Richard William Seale (1732-1785) was an English draughtsman and engraver who worked for a number of individuals engraving maps for atlases and other books. He worked for Popple (1733), Tindal for his translation and continuation of Rapin's "The History of England" (1744-7), Pine and Tinney (1749), Bolton's "North America" (1750), Stow (1756) and "Universal Magazine" (1747-63) (Tooley, "Tooley's Dictionary of Mapmakers" 572-3).

This particular map was published in Rapin's "The History of England" volume 3, translated by Nicolas Tindal. According to Wheat, despite its late publication date of 1744 (1745?), the map continues to display a number of "throwback notions" of North American geography. For instance, the map follows the geography from apocryphal accounts by Baron Louis-Armand de Lom D'Arce de Lahontan in the late seventeenth century. Moreover, California is shown as an island (Wheat, 70-1). Within California, a mountain chain is shown and two mountains are actually labeled: M. Nevada and Mt. St. Martin. Six towns are also labeled in California including Canot, St. Nicholas, St. Juan, St. Isidore, Gigante and Na Sa de la Guada (Tooley, "California as an Island" 134, entry 97).

Baron Louis-Armand de Lom D'arce de Lahontan was a French military officer who served in various campaigns in Canada during the late seventeenth century. In 1683, he was first stationed in Quebec as a lieutenant. He later fought the Iroquois in 1684. After some exploration in 1685 in which he ended up at the River Minnesota, he published an account of his adventures there in "Nouveau Voyages dans l'Amérique Septentrionale" (1703), including in it a map of a mythical area in which a large and lavish tribe allegedly lived.

Source(s):

Howgego, Raymond John. "Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800: A Comprehensive Reference Guide to the History and Literature of Exploration, Travel, and Colonization from the Earliest Times to the Year 1800." Potts Point, Australia: Hordern House, 2003.